Extraction at the UNFCCC
- Download our Brief on Extraction at the UNFCCC
The key mitigation topic has been excluded from the UN Climate talks so far:
Fossil Fuel Extraction
Decades of attempts at reducing emissions on a national level have done almost nothing to coal, oil and gas extraction. In globalized energy markets, extraction projects will only be cancelled if global demand is projected to drop over the long term. This hasn’t been the case. A drop in national demand doesn’t reduce overall emissions, it just shifts them. In turn, reducing extraction drives up fossil energy prices all around the world and changes the game for the race between clean and dirty energy, everywhere.
We have been betting on the wrong horse (called “Reducing emissions”) all along and it is time to change that. We urgently need an Extraction Protocol, for COP21 in Paris at the end of 2015.
We propose that the following issues be taken up on the UNFCCC agenda in order to accomplish its mission to avoid dangerous human interference with the climate system:
- National fossil extraction phase out plans (long term, before 2100)
- Global Fossil Fuel Exploration Moratorium
- Fossil Fuel subsidy reform (concrete steps and timeline, e.g. redirected towards a Global Feed-in Tariff)
- Extraction tax to support a just transition of extraction countries (see also the initial Yasuní-ITT initiative and the Future Box)
- A global mechanism, such as proposed in: Nishimura proposal, Kyoto2, Earth Atmospheric Trust, Cap and Share
The IPCC has pointed out the issue: we have 4 to 7 times the amount of fossil reserves we may extract. But governments are not facing the fact that fossil fuel extraction must be phased out over the next decades. Only Costa Rica has an oil moratorium in place and Ecuador was inviting support for its Yasuní-ITT Initiative to leave its oil in the ground until recently. No other government is talking about extraction yet. This must change.
Extraction is the first point on the XYZ Agenda on climate change.
Sign here to call on your government to develop a national plan to phase out fossil fuel extraction: